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by jader201·14y ago·view on hn ↗
What about database design debt? Or is this still considered technical debt?

In our company, this is 90% responsible for the paralysis that is keeping us from migrating from a 10 year old enterprise architecture. It is designed in such a way that makes it hard for us to extend and scale, but the whole foundation of our business rests on this outdated model. It's to the point that the only way we can move forward is to start over.

I've read about technical debt, but it's usually in reference to code design, lack of proper testing, and tightly coupled dependencies.

And we definitely suffer from "infrastructure debt" as this article describes, but I feel this is the least of our problems.

To me, possibly the most expensive kind of debt to be in is database design debt, as everything rests on this. At least this is the case where I work.

1 comments
(I'm the blog post author)

I would place database design debt firmly in the technical debt side of the ledger (as it were). To me, infrastructure debt deals more with consistency across environments and consistency in moving code from one environment to another.

I also agree with you that database design debt is very expensive and, as you pointed out, leads to paralysis over fixing problems with an established application.